Marketing is Bullshit

You know the kind, endless promotion, spam emails, weekly postcards sent in the mail (and immediately sent to the trash can) social media that is nothing more than talking about product, etc.

When marketers only think of promoting something, things become forced and contrived.

As marketers our job is not to sell, it’s to educate, influence, and inspire our ideal customers to take action.

So how can we, as marketers, up our game in 2018?

Teach Something
Marketing is education – plain and simple. When people first identify they have a problem they need to solve, chances are they are not ready to make a buying decision right away. The first thing they do is research and identify what the potential solutions to their problem may be.

If you’re able to teach your prospect about something of interest to them, you’ll position yourself as an expert to that customer and provide them value far beyond just teaching them about your product. A great example of this is a tax accountant that writes about the implications of the latest tax changes for small business owners. As a potential customer a small business owner will receive value and education from the accountant as well as identify that the accountant knows what she is doing.

Typeform is one of my favorite examples of a company that uses their platform (in this case, their blog) to educate readers about digital marketing and new techniques. They write about topics like customer service, lead generation, and even some more technical things like Net Promoter Score and teach their readers about the topic in a fairly objective way – meaning they don’t just promote their product, they teach first and sell second.

Tell a Story
Storytelling always wins in marketing.

People understand things more clearly when there is a narrative behind it. If you can connect with your customer through a great narrative the selling will handle itself – use your marketing platform to tell your customers how their lives will be impacted by working with your or buying your product and show them the results that they may see.

Try Something New
Out of the box thinking pushes brands forward. We shouldn’t be living in a world of doing things the way they’ve always been done just because it’s always been done that way.

Never used social media (hard to imagine you haven’t… maybe we should say haven’t used it effectively) for marketing, never tried marketing automation, never formalized a prospecting and direct outreach strategy, haven’t done video? Now is the time to do it.

Try something new with your marketing and you’ll often be surprised that you’ve been leaving results on the table.